Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Palestinians Are Running Out of Friends Again

Palestinians salute Hamas

By Alan
Caruba

The news
of the day is former President Jimmy Carter who placed the blame for the Paris
jihadist massacre on—you guessed it—Israel. That reflects the surreal world in
which anti-Semites live.

Meanwhile,
the Palestinians, both Fatah and Hamas, are running out of friends. For reasons
that defy any logic and which have no basis in fact, Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas is seeking recognition of the Palestinian state from
the United Nations. He’s also applied for membership in the International
Criminal Court.

The Palestinians who have refused
every opportunity to become an independent state when it was offered by the UN
or Israel now insist that they should be recognized as one. The problem is that
they have never functioned as a state.

For
example, who founded it? Answer, no one. It has no founder unless one regards
Yassir Arafat as one, but Arafat ran Palestine entirely by himself. Then
there’s the question of its borders. Where are they? You can find Israel’s on a
map, but they do not exist for Palestine. What is the capital city of
Palestine? It has none. It doesn’t have its own currency.

There is no
Palestinian state.

What
exists are people who are identified as Palestinians by other Arab nations who
have used them as pawns since they lost their wars with Israel. Instead, they
reside in “refugee” camps from the days of Israel’s independence in 1948 or in
areas the Israelis have designated in the West Bank and Gaza. Last year, after
Hamas had shelled Israel with rockets for months, the residents of Gaza had to
pay a high price when the Israelis finally retaliated.

The
Palestinians and their supporters call it a war crime when the Israelis defend
themselves.

Abbas
insists that they be allowed to “return” to a Palestine that was never a
nation-state, but rather a name applied to the area that has for more than
3,000 years been called Israel. At this point, two generations after Israel’s
independence, few “Palestinians” have ever lived in Israel and the Arabs that
do live there enjoy full rights as Israeli citizens and have no wish to be
anything other than Israelis.

As noted
by the Middle East Forum, “Under the 1994 Paris Protocol, adopted as one of the
Oslo Accords, Israel collects customs taxes on good shipped to the Palestinian
areas, the Value Added Tax for goods and services sold in Israel and intended
for PA consumption, and petroleum excises, and well as small amounts of income
tax from PA residents working in Israel. Under these clearance revenues are
transferred monthly directly from Israel to the PA Finance Ministry, and they
are the PA’s largest source of funds.”

Israel has
cut off these funds eight times in the past, usually in response to terrorist
activity in the West Bank and Gaza or to protest Palestinian diplomatic efforts
such as its current effort at the UN. On January 2, 2015, Israel decided to
once again withhold the funds in response to the PA’s hostile activity at the
International Criminal Court where it wants to have Israel tried for what it
calls “war crimes” and the rest of the world calls self-defense.

In the
January 5 edition of The Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens who had
spent some years working in Jerusalem and had the opportunity to see Abbas up
close, wrote of his “serial fiascos over the decade, culminating in his failed
bid last week to force a vote in the Security Council over Palestinian
statehood.”

Stephens noted that “In 2005, Israel
withdrew from the Gaza Strip, leaving Mr. Abbas in charge and giving him a
chance to make something of the territory. Gaza dissolved into a civil war
within months. In 2008, Israel offered Mr. Abbas a state covering 94% of the
West Bank, along with a compensatory 6% of Israeli territory and a land bridge
to Gaza. Mr. Abbas never took up the offer.”

Indeed,
neither Arafat nor his successor, Abbas, has ever taken up any offer of
statehood, so why now? Stephens says that, from the point of view of Abbas,
“such a state is infinitely more trivial than a Palestinian struggle. Becoming
is better than being. So long as ‘Palestine’ is in the process of becoming, it
matters. Once it exists, it all but doesn’t.”

On January
6, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced a bill that would withhold U.S. aid
to the Palestinians until their leadership withdraws its controversial bid to
join the International Criminal Court. The bill would freeze $400 million in
aid that is annually sent to the Palestinian Authority that includes
Hamas, a terrorist organization, at this point.

In 2011,
David B. Rivkin Jr and Lee A Casey, lawyers who had served in the Reagan and
George H.W. Bush administrations, spelled out why this latest effort to get the
UN to declare Palestine a state is invalid. “The Palestinian Authority, by
contrast, does not meet the basic characteristics of a state necessary for such
recognition. These requirements have been refined through centuries of custom
and practice, and were authoritatively articulated in the 1933 Montevideo
Convention on the Rights and Duties of States.”

“As that
treaty provides, to be a state an entity must have (1) a permanent population,
(2) a defined territory, (3) a government, and (4) the capacity to enter into
relations with other states.” The Palestinian Authority does not meet any of
those requirements since it is, essentially, Abbas and his staff. Abbas, who
was elected to a four-year term is now in his tenth year in office without the
bother of calling any other elections.

Even if a
UN vote were taken, the United States would veto it in the Security Council. So
all of this is just one more bizarre and stupid charade that Abbas and the
Palestinians engage in from time to time.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.